​In the current Times Literary Supplement, Nicholas Gibbs offers what seems at first glance to be a convincing solution to the “mystery” of the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval treatise written in what was long considered a secret code. I’ll leave you to read the details, but the short version is that the characters in the text are not code but are Latin ligatures—like an ampersand—that use artistic representations of letters to stand for a whole word. By reading the ligatures against known examples, and comparing the illustrations to similar examples from known medieval texts, Gibbs was able to translate the manuscript and reveal that it was actually a recipe book for women’s health cures assembled from copied sections of standard medieval medical treatises with illustrations that were often badly copied from these texts and therefore sometimes distorted and confusing. I think it a bit hilarious, if true, that vast conspiracies have been erected atop the supposed secrets of what Gibbs describes as a gynecology manual.

​Last week, UFO researcher Jacques Vallée spoke with Alex Tsakiris of Skeptico to discuss the UFO phenomenon and other paranormal topics. While Vallée did not specifically repudiate the work for which he is best known, he continued the gradual shift in his feelings about flying saucers. Vallée has long been an advocate of the so-called ultra-terrestrial hypothesis, whereby UFOs are to be understood as a parapsychological phenomenon originating in human consciousness, but now he is more or less conceding that the only real reason to study UFOs is to use them as a framework for exploring cutting-edge scientific hypotheses that have yet to receive evidentiary support.

“So, among other things,” he said, “the UFO problem is a goldmine for somebody who wants to look at the history of ideas. I mean, you don’t have to take a position for or against UFOs; you just look at the record. […] So, in a way, studying this phenomena (sic) – both parapsychology and the UFO phenomenon – is just a way, it’s a glorious way into what physics is going to be for the next 50 years.” The implication is fairly clear: UFOs aren’t something “real” in any material sense but rather an idea that, by dint of being believed, has become a catalyst for new theories to help investigate their non-existence. In this, I am reminded of Hermeticism and alchemy in the Early Modern period. Neither was “true” in the modern scientific sense, but the effort to try to prove that Hermes really existed helped to develop new historiographic methods that eventually disproved him, just as the effort to explore the material world with Hermetic alchemy sparked new scientific methods that eventually disproved alchemy.

Vallée is in some ways an alchemist of sorts. I have ﻿previously criticized﻿ his attempt to explore the “UFO phenomenon” on the grounds that there is no evidence that such a “phenomenon” is anything more than the creation of modern Western culture, a myth imposed on unusual but unrelated events, ranging from lights in the sky to night terrors to cattle predation. In this, I am reminded of the Greco-Roman effort to impose the myth of the Giants onto the real world, interpreting unrelated pieces of physical “evidence,” ranging from geological formations to ancient stone walls to Ice Age mammal bones, as proof of Giants. So far, there is no reason to suspect differently of UFOs, but Vallée believes he can transmute lead into gold by generating proof of the “phenomenon” from the application of quantum physics to claimed UFO “evidence.” To that end, Vallée says that he has “quietly” been researching quantum entanglement in order to understand the “things left behind after UFO encounters.”

Vallée said that he has collected pieces of metal claimed to have fallen from UFOs and had them analyzed in a mass spectrometer owned by a company that he finances as a venture capitalist. “I’m pretty well connected with the high-tech community, including one company that I financed as a venture capitalist,” he said. Vallée claims that the metal shards contain a ratio of isotopes that is “100% off” from readings of Earth-based iron, and significantly different from meteoric iron. Vallée cautioned that the results are “very preliminary” but declared them “fascinating.” While he described working with engineers who built the mass spectrometer, he did not mention working with geologists, chemists, or physicists in order to understand the results in the context of what is known about terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials. There are several reasons to be cautious, none more than the fact that Vallée did not actually collect the samples himself; rather, three pieces of metal were sent to him by unnamed individuals in France who claimed to have witnessed UFOs. The allegation that the metal came from a spacecraft is therefore dependent on the trust that we place in three unnamed French witnesses.

I’ll be honest: I don’t get the awe and reverence with which Vallée is held in the UFO community. Perhaps it is because I have dug through his work and found a pattern of misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and fakery. Perhaps it is because I am not impressed by a French accent and helmet of hair. More likely it is because I wasn’t alive in the 1970s when he was famous enough to inspire a character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and to substitute for Rod Serling in UFO documentaries after Serling’s death. Tsarkiris says “Dr. Jacques Vallée is an almost mythical figure among those interested in UFOs.” But my problem is that Vallée has been researching this topic since the middle 1960s and has nothing to show for it. He has spent my entire lifetime and nearly all of my parents’ lifetimes searching for the truth about UFOs, and all he has to show for it is a very French postmodern hypothesis that UFOs are a psychological projection of an interdimensional reality, which in fifty years he has supported with nothing resembling evidence that is (a) accurate and correct and (b) sufficient to convince a skeptical observer to reject the null hypothesis.

The last sentence could be interpreted as saying that Vallee has caused you and your parents to waste your entire lifetime searching for the truth about UFOs. I didn't realize that your family were such enthusiastic believers! (joking, of course)

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Clete

9/8/2017 11:32:07 am

The Voynich manuscript reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man". When it is finally translated it turns out not to be something the aliens have to serve mankind, but a cookbook.

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Bob Jase

9/8/2017 12:22:34 pm

Nicholas Gibbs is a superb cherry-picker - most of the VZoynich doesn't have those illustrations of women bathing but rather has weird plants and astronomical charts.

I'm surprised the ufo believers still have a place for Vallee, he's old and his ideas are not mainstream-crazy. And as you say, fifty years of study with nothing to show for it, though evidence has never meant much to fringers.

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Shane Sullivan

9/8/2017 12:49:15 pm

Yes, the Voynich Manuscript has more weird-looking flowers in it than a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.

...Maybe Gibbs is on to something...

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Clint Knapp

9/8/2017 10:52:09 pm

In fairness to Gibbs's proposal, we're talking about a medieval document here. Astrological considerations and medical science were not wholly divorced yet and their inclusion would not be out of the ordinary. The botanical section and its potential for cross purposes with medicine should be obvious, but then we have to note that very few of the illustrations actually seem to be identifiable plants.

That said, while he does make an interesting argument, I'm not entirely sold. That it could be a medical text of some sort does seem plausible, but he needs to show the work a bit more thoroughly and apply it across the entire thing to make a real case.

Which, of course, has always been the problem with Voynich scholars. They stumble into one method, apply it to a small section, and declare the whole thing decoded.

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tom mellett

9/8/2017 06:08:00 pm

But of course, Jason! Why else would Tom de Longe have tapped Jacques Vallee to write the introduction to the Sekret Machines book written by Peter Levenda?

And Jacques has a direct challenge for you, Jason, you willfully blind skepticultist, you! He hoists you on your own petard of post-modernism to confront you with the post-post modern post-existentialist challenge of re-negotiating your grasp of physical reality!

---------------
"Let’s concede to the skeptics, for the sake of argument, that UFOs don’t exist, as the experts of SETI and the consensus of Academe keep assuring us. Let us assume that reports of such objects are indeed inconsistent with anthropocentric ideas of physical reality as the sophisticated edifice of modern science understands it.

In a subtle twist of logic that would have delighted the philosophers of the Derrida school, this denial of the testimony compiled from hundreds of thousands of sightings all over the world suddenly enables us to accept them freely:

What harm could there be in acknowledging these meaningless stories in the light of day? As the authors of this book argue brilliantly, once we agree that UFOs are impossible, nothing stops us from opening the files—even the secret ones: Indeed, “The UFO can be ‘known’ only by not asking what it is.”

Which logically leads us to realize something else: If UFOs and physical reality are incompatible, maybe the time has come to re-negotiate physical reality. Because, as we all know, these impossible UFOs that don’t exist are not going away.

Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda, who have had privileged access to long-denied information, have re-opened the debate around these two questions. The persistence of the phenomenon in the full glory of its impossibility forces a fundamental re-examination of our history and our presence on earth, and it opens the heady prospect of a breakthrough beyond the confusion and ugly contradictions of modern physics.
[ . . . ]
To their credit, the authors are well aware that this ancient material is brittle. They bravely question the scholars’ various hypotheses and the respectable traditions of established pieties, but they do not try to force upon us a new ideology of their own.

Retaining the analytical sense that is critical in approaching this material, they display it before us in all its complexity. They invite you, as they have invited me, to join in a completely new phase of research, informed by the oldest and the most recent sources.

The “Sekret machines” have a message for us. The time has come to decipher it."
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Only Me

9/8/2017 06:57:47 pm

>>> If UFOs and physical reality are incompatible, maybe the time has come to re-negotiate physical reality.<<<

Or, and I'm going out on a limb here, Vallée should accept there is nothing to the UFO phenomenon.

>>>The “Sekret machines” have a message for us. The time has come to decipher it.<<<

Yes, the message is "Buy our books that rehash the same claims while we pretend we've provided new revelations."

>>>What harm could there be in acknowledging these meaningless stories in the light of day?<<<

Nothing, until people like Vallée, DeLonge and Levenda claim these stories as some "truth" and bilk the gullible for money.

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tom mellett

9/8/2017 07:35:46 pm

Here is a recent article about the Voynich Manuscript, where the focus is on the author, whom he believes to be an Italian Jew. It seems quite compatible with Gibbs' claims about the content.

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The scholar draws evidence for his theory of the author’s identity from a range of illustrations in the manuscript, particularly a section in which naked women are depicted bathing in green pools supplied by intestinal-like pipes.

The doctor, whose work includes editing the spiritual diaries of the Tudor mystic John Dee, believes the illustrations show communal Jewish baths called mikvah, which are still used in Orthodox Judaism to clean women after childbirth or menstruation.

Pointing to the fact that the pictures show only nude women and no men, Skinner told the Guardian: “The only place you see women like that bathing together in Europe at that time was in the purification baths that have been used by Orthodox Jews for the last 2,000 years.”
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A C

9/11/2017 05:08:48 pm

Among the serious scholars (eg the ones not just connecting random mysteries and pretending that counts as evidence) the rough genre of the Voynich Manuscript has never really been a mystery. That a late medieval/early renaissance medical and herbal treatise would be encoded isn't strange in the slightest; its only the method of encoding that was a mystery.

If Nicholas Gibbs is write then its another victory for solving problems by taking the effort to put them into context. Its a recurring theme in articles and documentaries that mention the manuscript that they call the illustrations 'strange' without giving much comparison to show how 'strange' they actually would have been to non-modern people. Most of the code breakers' problem is that they insist on looking at the manuscript as a code breaker's problem.

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Americanegro

9/11/2017 06:37:54 pm

The typo's я kind of a givaway, Captain Typo.

"the rough genre of the Voynich Manuscript has never really been a mystery"